Teachers are failing to stretch children's imaginations by giving them football chants and raps in literature lessons rather than poems that challenge them, the former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion said today.

Schools are underestimating pupils' intelligence and stifling their creativity by only offering them chants and raps or the verses of children's poets, such as Spike Milligan and Roald Dahl, Motion told the North of England Education Conference in York.

Motion, poet laureate for a decade until last year, said many English teachers were not "equipped" to teach poetry and simply passed on their anxiety for the subject. Less than half of teachers are English graduates, he said, and lack confidence when teaching poetry.

He attacked the education system for its "tick box" culture, which he said put too little emphasis on fuelling the imagination and pupils' emotional response to literature.

Teachers are being trained to tell children that to explain a poem all you did was "add up the similes, spot the alliteration and say something about the verse structure," he said.

Schools should hold a national poetry recital contest, similar to the spelling bees in the US, he said. He called for a revival in learning verses by heart and for pupils to be taught "more challenging" poems, such as those of Geoffrey Hill and Don Paterson.

"The best poems for children are not necessarily those written with children in mind," he said.

"Our challenge now is to make sure that our pupils enjoy the range of writing available to them … It's very tempting and especially with students who are already frightened or suspicious or disliking of poetry, to coax them towards it by offering something that appears to speak directly to their experience, by choosing a poem about football for a football-loving boy, a rap for a fan of Eminem.

"There's nothing wrong with this tactic, provided we recognise that matching like with like is only the beginning of a process. If we give our students only one kind of poetry to read, a kind they immediately recognise, it would be like taking someone to a palace, parking them at the door, and telling them to go no further … Why, after all, should we pretend that poetry is always and inevitably easy; it isn't … Get over it. We need to better equip teachers to engage with a range of poetry – wider than is presently on offer."

Motion said while many teachers hold poetry writing classes for their pupils, many others believed that if they paid significant attention to children's imaginations, "they were betraying their duties to their charges by straying off-piste".

He said: "At the moment, our teacher-training programmes are producing people who are simply not equipped to teach it. Worse than that, I'd say we are producing a lot of teachers who remember being anxious around the reading and writing of poetry when they were children themselves, and who are therefore very likely to end up communicating that anxiety, rather than anything else."

By developing children's imaginations, teachers gave children confidence and insight into their characters, Motion said.

"To develop the imagination is self-validating as well as self-extending," he said. "Poetry is at once a very primitive and a very subtle thing – an expression of our fundamentally human and passionate delight in rhythms, sounds and patterns, and also of our sophisticated need for ingenuity. It is the written form that puts us most deeply in touch with ourselves, because it is a hotwire to our strongest feelings. … The appetite for poetry is fundamental to us as human beings. What on earth have we done, producing an education system in this country which allows the majority of people, by the time they hit puberty, to think otherwise?"

In 2007, Ofsted said pupils in England studied too many lightweight poems in primary school and that many teachers did not know enough about poetry. This led them to teach a limited range of work by poets, such as Spike Milligan, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.

Schools were encouraged to hold contests for the worst and best football chants and invite a rapper into lessons as part of the government-inspired National Year of Reading in 2008.